Fission Mailed Metapuzzle Solution

How It Works

Over the course of the Game, teams had been given the following items and told that they might come in handy later:

  • Van Keys
  • A Nextel Phone
  • A roll of Charmin TP
  • A box of Lucky Charms
  • A UV light
  • Air Duster/Keyboard Cleaner
  • Air freshener
  • A fuse
  • Mentos
  • A rag
  • A cardboard box

Upon arrival to building 18, teams met up with a scientist who verified that all items had been collected and escorted teams through the high-security lab. As teams progressed through the lab, there were various sensors that would set off alarms if not properly disabled. Teams needed to use the items they were given to disable these alarms. The sensors were as follows below. All sensors had writing near them that could be seen with the UV light to provide further clues as to what item needed to be used.

  • Keypad + Motion sensor (UV Light): The first sensor required teams to use their UV light to find the password for the keypad. Near the keypad a message indicating that the passcode was "1234" could be found.
  • Temperature sensor + Motion sensor (Air Duster): The second sensor was a temperature sensor that would disable the motion sensor if it got cold enough. Teams had to spray the sensor holding the air duster upside down.
  • RFID sensor + Motion sensor (Van keys): All of the teams' van keys had an RFID fob on the keychain. This was needed to disable this sensor.
  • Patrolling guard (cardboard box): Instructions on a nearby wall informed teams how to 'disable' the patrolling guard. A team member had to approach the guard in a cardboard box to not be seen.
  • Laser sensors (air freshener): Teams finally arrived at a laser grid that required them to use their air freshener to see the beams so that they did not trip the alarm.

When teams had made it through the 5 obstacles, they arrived at a dead end. Here there was a rebus that the teams needed to use the UV light to see. The rebus said:

something soft + S - something Lucky + something small + D + something that rings - 1 + something you wipe with + something sweet - O

The remaining items were used to solve the rebus, which solved to "INFUSED FRAGMENTS." Teams phoned this in to complete the game.

Design Notes

The idea for this puzzles came up fairly early in planning this year, and was inspired by the 'bag of crap' in Illumine. In the Illumine wrap-up a team member had mentioned that they thought the bag of crap would be used in a rebus at the end of the game, and I thought it'd be fun to do a reverse-bag of crap instead.

The laser trap and the cardboard box were thought of early on, and the other trap ideas came from perusing sparkfun.com for sensors. Ben ended up owning building all of the hardware since I'm pretty incompetent when it comes to EE, and since I more or less wrote Ancient Empires we did a puzzle implementation swap. The traps all worked pretty reliably except for the laser trap, which was the fault of cheap lasers we bought in bulk online that couldn't stay on for more than three minutes without losing their charge.

Towards the end of plot planning we realized that this puzzle basically turned the plot into the movie Paycheck.

Construction Notes

For the beta we constructed the sensors mostly by hand out of various sensors from SparkFun.com. As with Cinco these boards were based on the Arduino platform, primarily because I hacked them together at the last minute with leftover parts from Cinco. The sensors mostly functioned, but the boards were sort of unreliable so my solution was to have another printed circuit board produced in bulk.

The new design was built from scratch based again on the Diecimila design, and this time, I sort of gambled by having 40 produced at once since we were running out of time. They worked perfectly the very first try - I think I need to buy a lottery ticket. One cool thing about the boards is that they're general purpose and designed to plug into a breadboard, so they can be reused for future projects. I did learn from the first order and this time specified red, not yellow, and as a result the Fission Mailed boards are much more attractive than the Cinco boards.

The hardware designs will be posted here shortly under a CC-Attribution-ShareAlike license for anyone interested in how the puzzle was implemented. I do have several extras, so I would potentially be willing to share one of the spare boards with anyone who offers a compelling argument via e-mail to fissionmailed@benandre.ws.

Our Chief Molex Architect, Andy Rich, stepped in at the last minute to provide much needed assistance with connectors and packaging. The sensors were contained in a 3.5. floppy disk box (lasers), a binder clip box (RFID), a plastic project box (temperature), and the best of all, a dominoes box (keypad). He deserves much of the credit for how awesome the puzzle looked when installed in the B18 garage.